Real-time multimedia communications are increasingly used as applications are able to be developed to utilize multimedia and as network infrastructures can handle increased throughput. One example of real-time multimedia communications is Internet Messaging using a web-camera. Most web-cameras for audio and video communications today have a physical connection to a host computer via a Universal Serial Bus (USB) cable. This restricts the web-camera to within a certain distance of the host computer, therefore preventing the web-camera from roaming around a house, office, coffee shop, etc.
Some web-cameras connect to host computers as Internet Protocol (IP) devices. This allows a web-camera to move remotely from a host computer, but the web-camera functionality is accessed as an external service that is not visible to applications running on the host computer without knowing the IP address for the IP web-camera.